I didn't back this on Kickstarter, bought it here once it was out for a week. Just finished it 20 minutes ago, and I give this a solid 4/5. It's far from perfect, but it also never screws up big time anywhere (except in one instance where it's not going to bother a lot of people. Positive aspects: * Loads and loads of areas to explore. * A huge array of weapons, gear and abilities to equip, and I loved Order of Ecclesia so having so many abilities to mix&match works well for me. * Solid combat gameplay, there's varied enemies with different attack patterns, open rooms vs small corridors, different weapon types with their own hitboxes, there's even Street Fighter style special attacks. * Final boss is boring but it's just the "win more" second phase. The actually difficult final boss, the first phase of the fight, wow that's damn well done! * The game is very pretty all in all, and plays with its engine well, including 3D sections like walking around a tower or inverting the screen. * Interesting takes on many classic movement skills. Not going to spoiler anything here but I was surprised by how they can incorporate a laser into Castlevania. <3 What could be better: * As many weapons, abilities and items as there are, balance is all over the place. That's par for the course for the genre, but still a bit weird in 2019. * There's a section which makes the graphics look bad near the end. * The voicework is annoying in parts since there's so many repetitions. Should have recorded 2-5 voice lines to alternate for the same thing. * The menu/inventory system isn't optimized for how often you need to change some abilities for movement purposes. But really, very enjoyable game. Quite worth the money, too!
First of all, yes I got this for free from the recent sale. Second, it is *quite* gorgeous to look at. But that's where the positive elements end, sadly. The game combines a very narrow cone of effective view (since enemies circle you in touching distance) with an underdeveloped first person cockpit view (and using external view sadly ruins the atmopshere). On top of that like some others have said it overdoes the whole "high difficult roguelike" because your shields break the moment you engage combat. Most roguelikes have a *dodge* or some other way of actively avoiding damage, this game forgot about one. And it doesn't help that combat itself is incredibly flat, coming down to drain shields -> kill, repeated ad nauseum. So yeah. Rather play *any* Dark Cells or Faster Than Light or Into The Breach or any other repeated-run game tbh. They're all better than this one. Pretty as it is.
At its core it is a soduko/elimination puzzle cranked up to, well, 60. As there's 60 fates to investigate. Sometimes, you can get lucky and someone will call out to someone in the moment of their demise (which you can see as a still image you can walk around in, all rendered in glorious 2-bit dithered graphics which looks really really cool). And it's easy to figure out who they called out to. Other times, your only hope is finding indirect clues (the game basically assumes this guesswork to be correct) like someone wearing particular clothing or showing an item on them which you could see among the belongings of someone given by name earlier. And yet again, sometimes all you can do is eliminate options until only one remains. It is nothing short of amazing. It's a genuinely great puzzler with a light but servicable (carries the gameplay well even in any case) background and story, a really unique and fitting (it is set in 1807) presentation and an incredibly attention to detail. If you, **at all**, enjoy puzzles, get this one. My contender for GOTY 2018 so far!
It's basically something between a Castle Wolfenstein and a Heretic, with a stylish asthetic and simple gameplay. However, what is there is *quite* polished. The upgrades are fun (reminiscend of Overload in their binary A-vs-B nature), the stat points work well and the perks feel significant enough. The bosses are genuinely difficult and the guns feel "weighty". If I had to criticize something it'd be the bugs (mostly audio, sadly something Unity is known for, the odd pop, brrrr or hiss) and the fact that normal difficulty makes non-boss enemies too easy while hard goes too far out of the other end with reset-to-title-screen. Needs something in between, really. Hence the -1 star.
I'll split this into reviews for the single- and multi-player due to how different they are. First the multiplayer: It's Frozen Synapse. Again. It's more polished with minor changes to the commands you can give and a new weapon type and some other fix-ups, but overall it's simply more FS. Which is good. And disappointing, kinda? I mean the game is good, great even, but it doesn't feel like something you'd be asked to buy again for the miniscule amount of changes. Then there's the singleplayer, the city mode. It's idea is big, it plays as a cross somewhere between X-COM Apocalypse and Frozen Synapse. The thing is, it also feels very confusing, underbaked and frankly underwhelming. It lacks the polish which made Apocalypse memorable. FS's combat mechanics cannot float something of this size either. The UI is underwhelming and hurtful more than helpful. Overall... it's rather disappointing. If this had been "the single player DLC", I would have said fine, optional expansion, there's people who enjoy this. It'd still be kinda meh, but alright. But the way it is, I can't truly recommend this game. Damn am I really giving FS2 a negative review? :(
This is a neat little game in that it allows you to play a damn solid party RPG in full multiplayer. That being said, while it is a solid RPG, both in story and in execution, the unique selling point usually works out in a negative way. For starters, it is damn near impossible to follow the story in a multiplayer session. There is also surprisingly little support for multiplayer inventory/skill management, as while you can easily trade, you don't have a good way of knowing who took which item when. The game basically forces you to constantly read the journal to follow it. Essentially I don't see where this is a decent multiplayer game, and playing it solo just shows that other games such as recent Obsidian offerings are superior as pure RPGs. Still, not a *bad* game. Just very mediocre.
First of all, this being free, obviously what you get cannot be expected to be too much. This is advertising for their kickstarter. I am aware. That being said, this game has a few ups, and many downs. It would be 2/5, only the price tag pushed it higher in my view. What does this game offer? Isometric point&click adventuring for ~2 hours depending on how fast you are. It has a nice creepy atmosphere and leaves most of the exposition to PDAs you can read, an optional mechanic I enjoy since the System Shock days. However on the downside, it has unskippable dialogue, wonky animations, the perspective + art style often make it difficult to know what is interactive in a scene, and the puzzles... oh dear the puzzles. The worst example was relatively early on with a can of protein powder which turns out to be basically the end-all-be-all gadget of puzzling. Apparently. Anyhow, it's free. What more can I say? Obviously it's cool for the price, but given that you still "pay" the time spent on it I feel there are much better point&click adventures out there, even if you have to pay money for them.
